Video installations / field trips!

It's been a little while since our the last post on here, between now and then Maia and I have packed our weeks with work a video installation, another viewing of videos, Andy Warhol's Screen Tests at the SAM, and Fiona Tan's video installations at the VAG. The video installation we worked on for the old Innate space, a dual streaming projection onto the floor and ceiling, created vortex-like images designed to invite people to interact with their space as it related to the images they see of it. Viewers would be in the images only if they got close to them, creating a cylinder of space from floor to ceiling for people to play in. We didn't have any Allan Sekula-like manifesto to pair with it, the installation was more a piece that we hoped would encourage people to experience their surrounding space in a different way.

A few days later, Maia and I went down to the Seattle Art Museum to see Andy Warhol's Screen Tests. Thirteen of them, each a four and a half minute portrait-like shot of a person, generally a celebrity. The four and a half minute time comes from Warhol shooting each Screen Test on a 3 minute reel at 24 frames a second, and playing them back at 16, creating a dream-like speed between real time and slow motion. In many of them, Warhol would turn the camera on and leave as the subject would be sitting in front of the camera for three minutes. Most were celebrities, used to being filmed and having their picture taken, but both of those are very different interactions with the camera than Warhol's Screen Tests. Pictures are quick, instant flashes that a person can pose for and be done with, in films a person puts on a similar but extended act to a role they are supposed to be playing. With Warhol's Screen Tests though, there is no real role or pose for the people behind the camera to be acting to, they simply sit as the camera sits across, staring at them.

The films remind me of Marina Abramovic's The Artist is Present and Dziga Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera. They are like Abramovic's piece in that a sitter sits silently across from a looker for a period of time, but in these pieces they are simultaneously sitting across from both no one and everyone. No one in that it's just a camera and the subject; everyone, because the actors knew Warhol's films would probably be shown to anyone who wanted to see them in galleries like the SAM. This no one/everyone effect caused the actors to behave like the people Vertov filmed in Man With a Movie Camera. In front of Warhol's camera, some like Lou Reed feign apathy, some squirm, some return the camera's stare, most are a variation of these.

Maia brought up the fact that these weren't necessarily video installations because Warhol made these pieces on 16mm film. The images may have been on film, but the camera-gaze effect on the actors would have been the same regardless of if the medium was film, tape, or DV. This brought up questions about medium specificity that Maia and I answered with a concrete "I can't really explain it, there's just something different about them." Obviously, there is a lot of difference between tape, DV, and film, but we were stumped as to whether or not Warhol's films would have had a different effect if they were in video.

A couple days after we got back, Maia and I had another video viewing where we watched some of Warhol's commercial work (eating a hamburger and a Japanese TV commercial) and all of John Baldessari's videos on Ubu Web. In an interview, Baldessari lamented his involvement with early video art because in his opinion early video art tended to be boring, which spurred him to make his video "I will not make any more boring art" where he monotonously writes the title over and over again for thirteen minutes. His next video "Six colorful inside jobs" is a time lapse of his painting a room a different color each day of the week, stretching the line between art and work. As a video and because of intention, it's art, but at the same time Baldessari has to spend a long time everyday in a house painter's uniform to paint these rooms, taking a smoke break or two in the middle of each color. Instead of showing us a room in 6 different colors, he takes us through the work required of it.

In true to his conceptual art perspective, Baldesarri's next video Title breaks down a film into its component parts--objects, characters, narrative, etc. Most of Baldessari's work deals with removing information to make us focus on what he wants us to think about and Title is no different-- he removes characters, sound, and narrative to show us a shot of the objects; objects, characters, and narrative to show us landscape; etc. These different units are used to create and manipulate meaning in something of a Kuleshov effect (longing look + sandwich = hunger). Baldessari works with this theme of creating meaning again in his video The Meaning of Various News Photographs According to Ed Henderson. In it, Baldessari hands Ed Henderson various news photographs stripped from the context of their story and asks Henderson to guess what's happening in them. Baldessari hands the photos to Henderson in a calculated order to see how he can manipulate what Henderson thinks the images mean. These meanings, though, are doubly skewed in that Baldessari is taping Henderson which again puts the Man With the Movie Camera effect on them, causing him to create more lavish stories than he otherwise would have if he weren't consciously being turned into an art piece.

The other videos we watched of Baldessari's (The Way We Do Art Now and John Baldessari Sings Sol Lewitt) were both ironic jabs at what people were considering art in the early 70's-- the former by making his own tiresome "exploration" as to what constitutes art, the later by making fun of his own medium in singing Sol Lewitt's Sentances On Conceptual Art. While Fiona Tann isn't a conceptual artist in Baldessari's tongue and cheek manner, the work we saw by her in the VAG today was more contemplative than formal. The major pieces we saw were Rise and Fall, Provenance, Island, and A Lapse of Memory.

Provenance is the first piece in her exhibit.The piece consists of 10 filmed portraits on individual screens. Like Warhol's Screen Tests, we sit across from a subject, studying them. However the feeling in these pieces is more of an intimate observation than Warhol's scrutinizing camera. These films move slowly, panning up a child's body, watching a man peel an orange, sitting with an elderly woman. The people in these are Tan's friends and relatives, filmed in their natural environment; this pre-established relationship between Tan and the subjects gets extended to the viewer as well, allows a strong feeling of intimacy between you and this stranger.

The next work in the show Rise and Fall is a dual screen projection about time, memory, isolation, and our world's ephemerality. Two women make up the story— one young, one old—and are suggested to be the same, distanced by time. With two women, two realities (reality and our constructed memory of it), and two time periods, the dual screens form another layer of these dualities as well as creating a conversation between the two screens. The screens tend to show the same scene, but they always differ slightly from one another, and because we never know which one is “real” and which is “constructed”, we are left with the experience of negotiating between the two.

Rise and Fall’s narrative, if you could call it that, is about the life of a woman who has lost someone, presumably her lover, and is working through what it means to have lost as well as the looming end of her own life. Tan illustrates the ebb and flow of human life with her interspersed shots of Niagra Falls. The enormous screens slowly pan from water to water fall, overwhelming us with its monumental size, sound, and metaphorical value. Tan’s work feels extremely patient, giving the space to think as well as feel her topics.

Isolation and memory are also at the core of her next work in the show, Island. Tan filmed the piece on the same Swedish island that Tarkovsky filmed The Sacrifice, and is composed of various austere images with a Chris Marker-like narrator who tells about a woman on an island as well as various musings about life such as “we do not remember dreams, but construct them” and “gaining distance is sometimes the only way to get closer to what matters.” Those two quotes embody so much of Tan’s work—both intensely solitary and contemplative. This monastic feeling is again embodied in her last work in the show A Lapse of Memory, about an amnesiac man living alone in a palliative home.

The home is actually the Royal Pavilion in Brighton; filled with Asian tapestries, the narrator tells us about the man’s youth as a worldly traveler named Henry but going by Ang-Lee. Henry’s character is almost Jean Pierre Jeunet-like in his eccentricisms—stringing construction lights along the floor, pounding his body for morning yoga, studying the globe with a flashlight, etc. His amnesia serves to further Tan’s conversation about memory, but in A Lapse of Memory it works to blur the borders of East and West because Henry/ Ang Lee doesn’t know his past and is surrounded by its stand-in objects. I don’t think Tan is trying to make a “we are the world” kind of piece here, but instead tries to ask us how to construct our identity in relation to, or in Henry’s case without, memory and origin. This relation is further complicated self-referential narration that reads us the shooting script as well as narrating Henry’s life. This contrasts with her other work that pulls you into her questions, while A Lapse of Memory’s self-referentiality pushes you back to view Henry more than sit with him as you would in Tan’s Provenance portraits. This doesn’t make the piece any less beautiful, especially because the palace drowns us in rich color, A Lapse of Memory is simply more of a character study than her other pieces—using this character as a device for examining questions about memory and identity.

Warhol videos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUQlpOhnxlE - Richard Rheem

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=In1c5O3bNeg&feature=related - Edie Sedgwick

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhYfCWd5XQ0&feature=related - Ann Buchanan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaf6zF-FJBk - Warhol eating a burger

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x82gWQFEpQA&NR=1 - TDK commercial

John Baldessari

http://www.ubu.com/film/baldessari.html

http://fora.tv/2009/07/09/John_Baldessari_A_Print_Retrospective

http://www.altx.com/vizarts/conceptual.html - Sol Lewitt's sentances

Fiona Tan

http://fionatan.nl/works/4 - Excerpts of all her works

absurdity, quick culture, and bodies

Maia and I are on the same page in terms of not being sure what to think about Ryan Trecartin's work, but it seems a lot of museums and organizations are stuffing him full of money and attention so he's doing something right. My idea of Trecartin is that he has a small theoretical base for his films, using the absurdity of his work to elicit intense theoretical readings by art critics. In one interview he describes this insanity as a product of technology and culture moving faster than they themselves, along with us, can really comprehend:

"The first brainstorm for the movie was in celebrating the messy transition of an accelerated crash into a world nature 2.0 that jumps into use before we have the time to ease into it with no culture space to form general understandings of new collective manners and appropriateness or codes of conduct. I love the idea of technology and culture moving faster than the understanding of those mediums by people. It’s like the jumper being jumped before the onset of “jump”—and the whole world is doing that, like tradition out and unmarketable."*

This warp speed progression makes sense in his work, reflecting a culture that, in the constant and exponential search for the new, has quickly moved so far from any comprehensible reality. Bjorn Melhus is another artist we watched last week who creates surreal/ eerie/ hilarious videos to critique contemporary culture. Instead of stressing the insanity of quick culture though, Melhus engages with the homogeneity of mass culture. As the subject of most of his videos, he stands in as a nondescript body with shaved head, miming voices from shopping networks, music, and the news. Melhus takes on a neutral pre-formed clone body image to represent these variations of our culture as a way to stress that the personalities we see delivering these lines to us are equivalent to programmed clones.

Pipilotti Rist was the third video artist we watched, and is something of a stand alone in relation to Trecartin and Melhus. Rist's videos are 80's feminist pieces that explore how the body, especially the female body, is used in relation to media technologies (e.g. video). in I'm Not the Girl Who Misses Much, she is constantly blurred, her voice accelerated, and image warped with occasional video tracking to accentuate how women are distorted by the those who record them, while in Sexy Sad I she turns the tables by using a naked man as the subject. In both cases, the subjects aren't supposed to appear as willing actors, but exploited bodies that get more and more furious as they continue to be filmed. Pikelporno, on the other hand, is an exploration of sexual bodies, starting with a female view of the male body, then switches POV to the man to take in the the woman. As a video that is essentially of two people having sex, Rist avoids their faces to not get lost in the personal aspects of sex, while interspersing metaphoric imagery to re-create the phenomenon of pure body lust.

*http://wexarts.org/wexblog/?p=299

Bjorn Melhus--
No sunshine
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMgzfpb4fsw&feature=related
Captain
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ju18NziwTX4
Again & Again
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQ0t96m-hQw&feature=related
America Sells
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kekpx8SWf1g&feature=related
Deadly Storm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lF0Ox9tOqFU&feature=related

Ryan Trecartin
K-Kora INK
http://www.ubu.com/film/trecartin_kcorea.html

Pipolotti Rist
Pikelporno
I'm Not The Girl Who Misses Much
Sexy Sad I
http://www.ubu.com/film/rist_works.html

Trecartin's Schizophrenia

Forrest has the list of videos we watched last week, which included such artists as Pipilotti Rist and Bjorn Melhus. We also ended up watching some more Ryan Trecartin. While I could write a bit about the other artists, for some reason I keep being pulled back to Trecartin's work, especially with my recent reading of Frederic Jameson and J-F Lyotard, and ended up spending the weekend watching a number of them all the way through.

Ryan Trecartin is a very young artist, only having graduated with his BFA from RISD in 2004, and two years later participating in the Whitney Biennale. His works tread the fine line between intelligent critique and complete insanity, and for some reason are incredibly compelling. Upon first viewing, I was dumbstruck by overstimulation. The hyper-speed of his pieces does not allow for the brain to fully comprehend is happening, requiring repetitive viewings or at least a lengthy recovery time. Part of the draw to his pieces seems to be that experience overstimulation, and the sort of numbness it produces. At the same time, however, while there may not be much intellectual depth, there is a quality to them that demands further inquiry and serves as a critique on contemporary culture—even if we can never actually understand what he is trying to say (if he even understands it himself).

Narrative continuity is completely deconstructed in his videos (which he himself critiques, for example, in I-Be AREA, one of the characters states, “You are always trying to make things sound more special, and digital, and non-linear than they are. It’s stupid.”).

For example, in A Family Finds Entertainment (2004), it is hard to find discern a cohesive narrative at all, especially since Trecartin plays multiple characters. In the video, Trecartin is shown as the character Skippy, painted red, who has locked himself in a bathroom, melodramatically proclaiming his existential problems, while cutting himself with a bread knife, as his elaborately costumed friends (who are partying in the other room) try to get him to come out. The jump cuts between the two rooms do not make any logical sense, and the actions of every character are entirely unpredictable. They have drastic mood swings, and digressions that are frequently interrupted by random cuts, graphics, changes in color and speed, and conversations that are completely disassociated from everyone and everything else going on. Skippy finally comes out of the bathroom (I have no idea why), and has some strange interactions with his sexually inappropriate parents from which he borrows money. He then leaves the house, meets a documentary filmmaker, and gets hit by a car. At the same time, we meet a female character, named Shin (also played by Treacartin), who wears extremely exaggerated makeup in bright primary colors, and is a conflation of every sort of party girl/gay male stereotype. She is at a party at a house, and is told on her cellphone that Skippy has been hit by a car and killed. Jump cuts, sped up footage, and disrupted sentence fragments follow, during which Shin seems to be trying to tell her friends what happened. Any linear quality to be found in the beginning of the film is completely gone, and it is impossible to understand what is going on. There is a lot of yelling in sped up, highpitched voices, and once she is able to tell her friends what happened with Skippy, there are suddenly bands everywhere. Skippy rises from the dead, and they all go outside to shoot off fireworks (during which everyone continues to scream hysterically), and then run inside before the cops show up.

The (un)structure of his videos is the epitome of the sort of schizophrenia Fredric Jameson talks about. The props, characters and themes of his videos are a pastiche of genders, nationalities, stereotypes and styles—a collection of unrelated, random signifiers that have been disconnected from their signification. His pieces are a heap of disparate symbols, collapsing past and future into an unstable present. It is hard to tell whether Trecartin’s pieces are a realistic critique of our experience in cybernetic techno-culture with its constant stream of images, sounds and words, or if it is complete nonsense, jumbled into a pile, played and edited at hyper-speed, and literally thrown in your face for 40 min to 2 hours. Or maybe that is the critique.

Trecartin has said about his videos that they are language.** They are not supposed to be a linear narrative film, they are designed, and transformed into pieces that mimic the way our brains work—the way they absorb, analyze and exchange information. While he scripts the videos ahead of time, the pieces frequently develop into something unexpected when the actors improvise, going off on tangents. As Trecartin put it, the videos are made through a process of “community web of share and tell.” The end resulting in a sort of emergence, in that, the piece becomes something of its own, an amalgamation of the group’s ideas and actions—a sort of collective consciousness.

I still do not really know what to think of Trecartin. Should I just blow him off as another wacky artist, or is he actually getting at some important truth about contemporary society. A lot of people seem to think he is pretty important, though, so maybe there is something there.

** For interviews see:
"THE Q&A: RYAN TRECARTIN, VIDEO ARTIST." MoreIntelligentLife.com

"Interview with Director Ryan Trecartin." Wexner Center For the Arts.

Feminism and Interactivity... Chatroulette?

The selection of videos we watched last week was very broad. In method and aesthetic, they were all incredibly different. However, they were all, in some form or another, a critique of popular culture and media. All of the artists were working within their specific cultural context, as well as their place within the evolution of feminist theory.

Lynn Hershman’s piece that we watched for the class was primarily about posthumanism and cybernetics, but a lot her other work (especially Lorna and her performance as Roberta Breitmore) is purely about construction of identity in mass mediated culture. Joan Braderman’s Joan Does Dynasty seemed to be more of a video essay (think Los Angeles Plays Itself), but with superimposed images of Braderman reading aloud her critique of the television show Dynasty—directly addressing the show and the audience. Braderman’s critique was placed distinctly within a 1980s feminist analysis of a popular television show at the time. Anne Hirsch’s project was more similar to Hershman’s performances, except in a contemporary YouTube context. Ryan Trecartin’s pieces were excessive (and make me want to add “hyper-” to “postmodern,” because I can’t begin to understand them), but in their excessiveness critique our immediate contemporary cybernetic culture. Following the evolution of feminist theory to include and address issues of trans-(cultural/gender/national/etc.) identities.

While we were supposed to be talking about interactivity that week, we did not really get a chance to really participate in any sort of interactive works. (Unless you take the view that simply watching a video is interactive and participatory.) Some of the projects however, were very interactive in nature, even if the part that we saw was not interacting. Forrest talked about Anne Hirsch’s YouTube persona, and the depths to which she went with her project. While the project was based in video, it was entirely dependent on feedback from her viewers. Her audience commented on the pieces, requested specific songs, created videos and sent her images in response. This sort of interactivity is new and specific to our current Internet experience, and it makes me think of Chatroulette.

Chatroulette adds a new level of immediacy to the meeting of strangers on the Internet. It is entirely up to chance with whom you will be paired (more frequently than one would hope, it is some guy masturbating), and if you don’t like the looks of someone, you can click on to the next one immediately. While not intended as an art project, its dependency on chance provides its participants with a unique experience of the Internet. While you are actually meeting strangers, the anonymity creates for interactions that would never happen in real life, or even through such a medium as YouTube. Since YouTube videos are uploaded for the entire world to see, there is censorship, they are still anonymous but linked to your account. With Chatroulette, participants are completely anonymous, yet the experience is oddly personal. It is a one on one interaction with a person—and that, paired with they anonymity, for some reason that means people are comfortable being sexually explicit. While it would be a different sort of project, much more ephemeral than Hirsch’s YouTube persona, I think it would be really interesting to explore Chatroulette from an artistic perspective. Such as, say, projecting it into a gallery.

Feminism, Interactivity, Reality TV

This week Maia & I read about and (tried to) watch feminist and interactive video art. We couldn’t get a hold of any interactive video art, but were a slightly more successful in regards to what might be considered past and current incarnations of feminist sentiment in video art. I’m a little disappointed that after reading Hershman’s article that was all about interactivity, we only got to watch one of her non-interactive videos. I got the impression that this video had more to do with cybernetics than it did feminism, but the subject in the video was a woman and the description on her website says “The premise of this digital video is that technology can infect the body through manipulated computer chips and invisibly seduce women into cyborghood.” In terms of feminism, the video shows the male-dominated control of information technologies, the use of information to control people, and in turn another incarnation of male-female power structures.

Joan Braderman on the other hand interrogates pop culture in her video Joan Does Dynasty. In the video, she assumes the position of a “stand up theorist” in front of a green screen showing clips from the 80’s soap Dynasty, using art and feminist theory to deconstruct the show. Joan’s video is wild, hilarious, but also informed. Joan Does Dynasty is a Mystery Science Theatre with serious undertone that reveals itself in parts in comments like “I confess my unreconstructed Dynasty delectation, though I have the intellectual tools to deconstruct its odious subtext. Does this tell you anything? Is deconstructing it merely a new way to love it? … This is what we want to know as feminists in the eighties.” Throughout the video, Braderman lies on the green screen, cuts holes in it to use it as a mask, stutters the clips, and uses intense optical zooming in and out to make her presence as disruptive as possible. Her disruptive presence makes both disengages us from simply falling into watching the show as well as being as visually agitating as she means to be intellectually engaging.

By being so agitating, Braderman points out how while neither Dynasty nor Joan Does Dynasty are interactive in the sense of viewer manipulation of the images, they can and should be interactive in respect to intellectual interactivity. Televisual passivity is a huge component of her critique in JDD, and gets pointed out by Martha Gever’s comment “By performing on-screen, variegated interpretation of Dynasty, Braderman both enacts and embodies the participation of the spectator in producing meaning, the specatators role as consumer of media representations, and the ability of the spectator to think critically about what’s on the screen.” In this sense, all of the videos that Maia and I watched this week, and every week for that matter, were interactive. A video is only interactive if the viewer engages with it, and likewise a medium is only passive if the viewer takes all given meaning at face value.

Braderman’s video is also an example of video art that presents both a female spectacle and speaker—her comedy and agitating effects create the spectacle, while intellectually hammering Dynasty as an active speaker. Anne Hirsch is another video artist who uses this same duality in her videos. A couple years ago Anne created an online persona named Caroline, sort of how Lynn Hershman created Roberta, but Caroline was an investigation what she calls the phenomena of the “fame whore” or “cam whore”. I got the chance to interview her last week (which I’ll post on here as soon as I get a copy of it) and she described the same Dichotomy between speaker and spectacle that Gever writes about and Braderman deconstructs. I don’t have a copy of the exact wording, but Hirsh described how when she was looking the videos that women post on youtube, they almost always were either shaking their butt and singing or talking to the camera/internet audience. So in an attempt to bridge the two as well as study this phenomenon, she built a persona by creating over a hundred videos in which she dances to pop songs and occasionally addresses the audience about the theory of what she’s doing under the veil of a naïve voice.

In pursuing her interest in the Famewhore, Camwhore, and viewer/audience interactivity Hirsh used her Caroline persona audition for and get onto the reality show Frank the Entertainer. Like I said above, I’ll post our discussion in which she talks about her experience on the show; she also wrote three articles for Bust magazine about her experience which I’ve linked on the bottom. While Hirsh’s work is mainly youtube and reality TV, it’s not only interactive, but a new type of interactivity. As Caroline, Hirsh would get the interactive element of fan-mail from people who thought they were just watching a girl dancing and keeping a vlog; these emails came both in the form of girls saying they want to be like her along with horny high school boys sending her pictures of their penises. In this way, the internet audience is interacting with her directly, while those watching as it as “art” can both interact with her work intellectually as well as sending “fan mail”.

Frank the Entertainer on the other hand represents a very different kind of interaction. Hirsh discussed how in reality tv the producers neither fabricate a fantasy nor do they stand back and let what happens happen—they use cajoling and charismatic suggestion to get cast members to create a sort of scripted reality. I never thought I would compare reality TV to Neo-realism, but it reminds me in a sense of Zavettini’s dismissal of both high fiction along with straight documentary. I’m not saying that Zavettini would endorse MTV reality shows, but they do both in this space between fiction and documentary, albeit anyone who sees reality TV as documentary is kidding themselves. To come back to interactivity though, reality TV presents an interesting case for passivity because it claims to be showing “reality”, which makes its viewers more apt to passively absorbing its meaning, which as Hirsh points out is a meaning fraught with sexist and racist stereotypes.

The last set of videos Maia and I watched were by Ryan Trecartin, another younger video artist and sculptor. Hirsh recommended him to me a while back, but Maia and I are still having a hard time wrapping our heads around him, so I can’t really say he is or isn’t a feminist video artist. His videos are a sort of neo-surrealist-alien-view-hyperbole of American culture, and while they can be hard to watch at times, I also find myself unable to stop.

Read:

Martha Gever – The Feminism Factor

Lynn Hershman – The Fantasy Beyond Control

Watched:

Lynn Hershman

Seduction of a Cyborg --

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nc9efa0j8O4

Joan Braderman

Joan Does Dynasty -- http://blip.tv/file/2962054 --

Anne Hirsch

http://www.youtube.com/user/scandalishious

http://bust.com/boob-tube/shaming-famewhores-part-i-on-becoming-a-famewhore.html

http://bust.com/boob-tube/shaming-famewhores-part-ii-on-being-a-failed-famewhore.html

http://bust.com/boob-tube/shaming-famewhores-part-iii-and-the-winning-famewhore-is….html

Ryan Trecartin

Sibling Topics - http://vimeo.com/5793454 --

I-Be AREA (Craig Ricky)

--http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzlSEpk0AGs&feature=related

I BE AREA (Pasta & Wendy M Peggy)

--http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZR4sHDR-1XE

I-BE AREA (Pasta & Mayflower) -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8fij0LIWgY&NR=1